The Implosion of Modi’s West Asia Policy

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian’s first foreign visit after the cessation of the war with the United States and Iran was to Islamabad on 23 June. It was ostensibly to thank Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Asim Munir, the country’s army chief, for their mediation in the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding. The United States, too, praised Pakistan’s role in facilitating peace negotiations. “I love Pakistan,” declared JD Vance, the US vice president, in Switzerland.

India has since scrambled to prove its relevance through typical optical grandstanding. The same day Pezeshkian visited Islamabad, Prime Minister Narendra Modi met the deputy secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Ghadir Nezamipour, at the conclusion of the BRICS National Security Advisers’ Meeting. But this does little to gloss over how India chose to position itself during the war. Far from isolating its regional adversary, India backed the losing side of a major regional conflagration, alienated its traditional partners and systematically surrendered its strategic leverage in the Persian Gulf. For decades, New Delhi maintained working ties with Israel, Iran, the Gulf monarchies and the Palestinians without subordinating one relationship to another, only for Modi to break that equilibrium by tilting towards the US–Israel–UAE axis while letting ties with Iran wither.

Modi’s West Asia policy has been sold for years as an exercise in strategic balance, civilisational reach and economic pragmatism. But its foundational flaw was its uncritical pivot toward Tel Aviv—a transition heavily lubricated by an ideological affiliation between Hindutva and Zionism, a shared supremacist antipathy toward Muslims that blinded New Delhi to the structural limits of Israeli power. If a partner’s only card is military violence, not diplomacy, then tethering your own regional strategy to that partner’s preferences is a poor bargain. The Modi government appeared more aligned with Israeli hard power than with regional restraint, even at the expense of India’s own strategic interests in West Asia.

The optics of Modi’s high-profile, ill-timed visit to Israel—declaring full and open-ended support for Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, just hours before Israel launched decapitation strikes against the ruling establishment in Tehran—were the most embarrassing foreign-policy fiasco of any Indian prime minister. It revealed the dysfunction of the strategic decision-making system in the Modi government, in which neither the national security advisor nor the minister of external affairs was capable of conducting a clear-eyed cost-benefit analysis of the prime minister’s visit. Or perhaps they did, but Modi overruled their advice in his desire to collect a ceremonial medal in the Knesset which could be used for domestic political campaigning.